If you have a problem with it do a search. Credit rolls have been unintuitive since Vegas 2.0 and have never been improved despite all the complaints.

John

The credit roll capability is a sorry kludge (for those that don't speak American slang, a kludge is something poorly designed).

I could write several pages about all the limitations, but the bottom line is that if you want to do really good credit rolls, you will either have to do some real work by animating standard text titles (and the titling capability in Vegas is nothing that great either), or use an external text program, render the results, and then use the results of that render in Vegas.

For me, there are dozens of other things I'd like to see fixed or improved in future versions, and I won't cry too much if Sony doesn't address the shortcoming in the title generator. What Sony should do, however, is develop an active third-party development program and start getting some really top level plug-ins developed. Plug-ins are the difference between a top-tier software program, and a second-tier product. Sony can never provide every last feature we collectively want to see in Vegas, but they can make sure that smaller developers have the tools they need to make these specialty features available to us at a reasonable cost.

As a former CEO of several software companies, my advice to Sony is this: Hire/promote someone and give him/her the title of Director, Third Party Development and give that person incentives based on both the number of plugins developed, and also on the total number of plugins sold. Sony should provide marketing help for these small developers (they are starting to do this in the quarterly Sony Video catalog), and that marketing help should include providing online "space" in the Sony online store.

I agree with u. Can't write correctly foreign names such as São; tão; ~ with the credit roll........

I've had great success using the "Placement" tab. It is keyframable [ ugly word! ], meaning you can have major control as to how things happen and slip and slide. The Text placement parameters: Ready made drop down postionings; The X and Y values - try "-" values too! ; and the "Safe Zone" setting as well. The "Properties" tab is a real bonus for Tracking and Scaling - again, these are Keyframable. THEN you've also got P/C to play with. I tried with Scrolling, all the way back to VideoFactory . . . I keep coming back to "Placement". Also this way allows for MSWord editing and the copy/paste tango too! I would think the "São; tão; " characters "should" come across from a text editor . . don't know about this but you could try - yeah?

Best regards,

Grazie

I was intrigued by Grazie's idea of using the standard text tool, and then using keyframes and the placement tab to create a credit roll.

I was able to create the roll, and it was neat to have control over so many things that are not available in the credit roll.

However, I must be doing something wrong. First, the render time was horrendous. Using the credit roll tool, a 25 second credit roll took exactly two minutes to render. By contrast, using the text tool and two keyframes (begin and end keyframe), the same text took over twenty minutes to render.

Second, the text quality using the text tool and keyframes was nowhere near as good. There are some serious issues in doing any credit roll with how to handle the issues with scan lines and interlacing. It looks to me as though these are not handled when using the keyframing and the text tool. I suppose I could have used "Best" rendering (I rendered using the NTSC DV template using "Good" for both the text and the credit roll tests), but that would have made the rendering even slower.

This is too bad, because the advantages of Grazie's approach are huge. Unfortunately, unless I'm doing something wrong, the render time, and the resulting quality make the approach unusable for me.

This thread got me thinking of a variation on Grazie's idea. I haven't had time to compare this but maybe it is worth a look.

I'm thinking about generating a still image in something like photoshop with a format of 720 x 'very big'. The 'very big' depends on how much text is to be scrolled. I'll use the text tools to generate whatever look I want. I could do a solid background or use alpha channel if it is for an overlay. This file gets imported and panned through to create the roll.

Question is, is this any more efficient than the method John just tried, and how does it look as it is scrolled?

I find this a good way to do credit rolls. I do the writing and text formatting in Freehand, since you have a lot of control over text there. You can export directly to a pixel format (ie. PNG). Then I do the scrolling in AfterEffects and render from there. The first time I tried this, Vegas gave poor results (scrolling was not smooth), so I went to AE. I didn't have time to tweak settings, so it can probably be done in Vegas too.
One thing I found is that adding a tiny bit of blur makes this type of credit roll look much smoother.

I could never get the credit roll to work on small fonts (20 or less) without excessive twinlkling (like a star at night) so I just don't use it anymore.

JJK